Symbolic Change Quotes

We have it in our heads that women only need to take up a certain amount of space and then we've done right by them. It's the same in every profession. We get a handful of women professors, a few female board members - that looks normal.

Symbols can often lead to progress.

You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?.

In the days when the nation depended on agriculture for its wealth it made the Lord Chancellor sit on a woolsack to remind him where the wealth came from. I would like to suggest we remove that now and make him sit on a crate of machine tools.

We do have a black president, and that means a lot. People ask, 'What has he done?' What he's done is change the color up, which you see on the screen. When the head of the free world is black, there's got to be some sort of spin-off from it.

Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing 'mere' about symbols.

Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.

Now we are proud that the government has moved from the class of the exploiters to the class of the people who were being exploited. And in the great name of the same class, I raise this nation's flag which is a strong symbol of this transfer.

For example, John Law's Mississippi Company venture printed shares, and the money had gone up in smoke when it had been inscribed objects. The inscription made it magic and changed its meaning. That's how objects become charmed in The Arabian Nights, and they are often originally ordinary objects. The carpet is an ordinary, paltry object. The lamp is a rusty old lamp, and the bottles jinns are imprisoned within are old bottles. They are changed by the magic and the jinn's presence, and the jinn's presence is often embodied in the seal or inscription.

Our property, we've taken the position that we're phasing out the Confederate flag.

There haven't been fundamental structural changes in America. There's been a very important symbolic change and that is the election of Barack Obama. But the only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The actual sight of a first-class house that a Negro has built is ten times more potent than pages of discussion about a house that he ought to build, or perhaps could build.

Stock ownership in the US is very highly concentrated. [Shareholder actions are] something, but it's like the old Communist Party in the USSR, it would be nice to see more protest inside the Communist Party but it's not democracy. It's not going to happen. [Shareholder actions] are a good step, but they're mostly symbolic.